Don’t miss an upcoming opportunity to get some press about the great work underway in our communities and the importance of manufacturing to our economy - national Manufacturing Day!NIST runs this event together with a group of media and corporate sponsors. Local participants, such as we IMCP’ers, can piggy back on this event by doing anything from organizing and coordinate local events to just using the NIST media kit to get local press.Jennifer Ptak, with Chicago Metro Metals IMCP region, has offered to help organize an IMCP-coordinated response.We need your help! Please:

1)Fill out this short survey on what your community has planned. Talk to your partners now, gather information on events, and submit the survey no later than August 31st. Please only fill out one survey per IMCP community. The information you provide will be used in a press release, blog post(s), etc., and will be shared with the Department of Commerce for their use.

2)Let us know your interest in participating in a joint video contestfor students participating in Manufacturing Day. This would be modeled after the State of New Hampshire’s 2014 ‘What’s So Cool About Manufacturing’ contest (click here for example). The idea is that each IMCP community would run a contest, select a winner, and put forth that winner for a contest among the 24 IMCP communities. A grand prize winner would then be selected. 3)Sign up to be an ‘Endorser’ for Manufacturing Day, submit a proclamation that your community supports Manufacturing Day, and finally, make sure that all of the events in your community are registered and listed on the Manufacturing Day website. All of these are FREE! 4)Help amplify our message. Send us ideas for press opportunities, or volunteer to write a blog post. Let us know what we can do to get the word out that IMCP communities are doing great things. Thanks in advance for your support of this effort. If you have any questions, please contact Jennifer at jennifer.ptak@cookcountyil.gov.

Want to learn more about the new batch of Manufacturing Communities? Check out the links below to media coverage of those announcements. We're also including links to the great coverage South Kansas got yesterday on their new EDA grant. We will post more links as we receive them. (Thanks to Julie Wenah, Erin Sparks and Tami Holzman, EDA and Debbie Franklin, South Kansas, for these links.)Got media coverage you want to share? Please send it to Sarah Lee -- we will post it, and all of it will get archived in a Media Coverage page that we will create later.

From food processing to chemical manufacturing, medical devices to metals, the new group of Manufacturing Community designees were announced today by US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker. You can read up on the winners in Commerce's ﻿news release,﻿ and then check out the ﻿nice shout-out Secretary Pritzker gave Southwestern Ohio Aerospace Region﻿ in her remarks at the US Manufacturing Summit when she made the IMCP announcement.